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Digital Power does Development

Digital Power does Development

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10 Digital Power does Development

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Author(s):

Josef Teboho Ansorge

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190245542.003.0010

This chapter looks at the concept of the technics of the politics of North-South relations. It begins with the notion of the periphery as a laboratory of social and political technologies for the core—exemplified by Michel Foucault's concept of the “boomerang effect.” This is followed by a discussion of the way technology—from liberation technology to cyber-utopianism—is treated and imagined in relation to the global South. It then proceeds to a study of the history of the development of fingerprinting that explicitly connects technologies used to identify individuals with colonialism while pointing to the constitutive, and globally interconnected, effects of such kinds of standardizing technical innovations. The main part of the chapter examines the applications of digital power in a case study of Demobilisation, Demilitarisation, and Reintegration (DDR) and Security Sector Reform (SSR) programs in Liberia (2003–10). These programs lend themselves well to the thematic focus of this book because they have particular information technology requirements. They are, for the main part, executed by foreign interveners; occur in geographic territories which, in a very short timespan, mix different modes of the technics of politics; and have as one of their primary, but overlooked, outputs a stable regime of individual documentation.

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 25 May 2019